My Several Worlds (15 page)

Years later, after the revolution had broken in Russia and Communism had taken it over, I was curious to know how the people fared. Time was then in the middle of the Second World War and Russia was a friend and an ally and not yet a potential enemy to the United States, and we still had the will to understand each other. I did not want to go to Russia again, however. I cannot speak the language, and unless I can speak the language of a country I find myself constricted and consequently impatient. Moreover, I had already a deep distrust and fear of Communism, for by then I had seen its effects in China. Yet I knew that the average people of any country judge their government by what it does for them and not by its theory, and remembering the misery I had seen in Russia thirty years before, it seemed to me at that time quite possible that the new Russian government might have improved the lot of the common man. At least it could not be worsened. I sought and found, therefore, a Russian woman in New York, one young enough to have grown up under the new regime and yet old enough to have been born under the old, and we became friends. Our long discussions were so interesting to me that I put them verbatim, though arranged and edited, into a short book, entitled
Talk About Russia.
There Masha, the daughter of Russian peasants, told me the story of her life as a child and a young girl in a new Russia entirely strange to me. I could never have endured its restrictions, and yet I could see, nevertheless, that Masha had lived a better—that is, an easier—life than had her parents, and if I felt that the tyrannies of the new regime were intolerable, I had to agree that at least there were compensations in food and opportunities for education. Thus Masha’s parents were illiterate but she and her brothers and sisters all went to college at the expense of the State. It was easy to understand her enthusiasm for her own country as we wrote our book together.

Even so, we differed often. For example, when we came to the matter of the right of free speech, so dear to an American, Masha could not understand why I felt it was an essential for happiness as well as for democracy.

“You Americans are always wanting so much to talk!” she exclaimed. “Why do you need always to talk?”

And we differed, too, on the absolutes of right and wrong as well as on the right to one’s own beliefs. For example, two books on Russia had just been that year published, both by American writers. One was favorable, the other unfavorable to the Soviet system. This Masha could not understand.

“One of the two is right and therefore the other is wrong,” she declared with indignation. “The one that is right should be kept, the other should be abolished.”

“But Masha,” I reasoned, “every American has the right to decide for himself which book is true.”

“And if some decide one is true and some decide the other is true?” she inquired.

“They have the right to differ,” I said.

“You call it the right, I call it the confusion,” she retorted.

To such discussion there can be no end. We were in this way as far apart as our two countries, and yet we became dear friends, and have so remained, accepting our difference.

Not long ago, however, I asked Masha how she felt now about Russia. She has lived a long time in the United States as a citizen and the wife of a well-known American, and years have passed since our book was published. And she is very changed, in many ways, from the girl who had come, so young and so Russian, to live in New York. She had longed for her own country and had been homesick until her husband let her go to visit her Russian family, “not knowing,” he told me, “when I put her on the train, whether I would ever see her again.”

And on the train, Masha told me, she was set back, and not to say shocked, because some Russian officers who were her compartment mates treated her as an American instead of a fellow countrywoman.

“Did you visit your parents, Masha?” I asked.

Her mother and father had been central figures in our book together. They had reminded me of other peasant couples I had known in China, and though I had never seen them, I had grown fond of them. Mother had been the typical humble Russian peasant wife until the revolution came and then she had caught at the one straw which she could use, which was that women and men were to be equal. The next time Father raised his hand to emphasize a command by a blow she had stood her ground. “I have the same equality you have and I am not afraid,” she had told Father. “Father was better to Mother after the revolution,” Masha had said, “so he stopped beating her. When he was mad he still threatened her, but he was afraid to touch her.”

“I did visit my parents,” Masha now replied. “And they were well and happy and glad to see me. They are old and retired but they live comfortably.”

She laughed, her grey eyes crinkling. “Do you know what Father said to me the first thing? He had seen our book. Someone had read it aloud to him, and so he said, reproachfully, ‘Masha, your book was so nice, but only one thing was not nice. Why did you tell all those Americans how I beat Mother? I didn’t beat her so very hard!’”

We both laughed and then Masha was serious. “As for other things, I found them not altogether the same. Someone’s husband, whom I knew, someone near to me, was sent away to Siberia for making criticism of the government. Nine years he must stay and still he did not come back when the years were over. So my friend went to look for her husband in Siberia and she found him in the labor camp, very thin and sick, and still working, and when she complained, the commissar laughed and said, ‘Oh, yes, it is time for him to go home—I forgot it—’ and they let him go and she thought they could now go home where the children waited. But when they reached the border they were stopped and told that never could they leave Siberia. This happens now and I could not believe it would have happened before when I was in Russia. And I know another friend who hides because he too had said something about Stalin and it was known.”

She sighed. “Perhaps revolutions are only good at first—I don’t know. But now I just live here quietly in America, not thinking at all about politics or such things, but only to be a good wife to John and a good mother to the children and to make the garden and so on. I have some roses, too, in my small greenhouse John made for me. Certainly my life is good now.”

And so Masha, too, could not tell me about Russia today. I have only the memory of that old country as I saw it decades ago, and all that happens has been and is the fulfillment of the inevitable, the premonition that lay so darkly upon me even when I was only a young girl.

And then we were in Poland, in the great beautiful city of Warsaw, where so much history and destruction have since taken place, and then in Berlin, and I could feel no quivering of its foundations. Yet only a few years later it became the storm center for the First World War. Paris lay dreaming in beauty that summer and if any Frenchman guessed what lay ahead in fewer years than could be counted upon the fingers of one hand he did not show it. I felt no more premonitions after we had left the dark Russian land. Europe was only a pleasure ground, and England when we went there was a bulwark. Uneasy though I had often been through my childhood when I watched the doings of individual Englishmen in Asia, I felt nothing in London and in the little English towns and villages except a life as solid as the globe itself. I used to watch, as a very small child, the bearers from the wharfs of river steamers on the Yangtse as they carried bags of sugar from the English ships that had come in from Java and bales of cotton from India and boxes of tinned butter from Australia. Those were heavy loads and the thin wiry figures of the Chinese men, naked to the waists, trembled under their weight. Every man had a tally stick when he left the hulk to which the ship was tied, and this tally stick had to be checked by an Englishman, sitting in a comfortable chair at a table under an umbrella on the street that ran along the Bund of the British Concession. Too thoughtful a child I doubtless was, for I was troubled by the sad humility of the brown men and the cold impartial calm of the white man. I was troubled because the load was too heavy and the white man did not care that it was, and because I knew each bearer was poor and I could imagine his family, working and perhaps living on one of the little river sampans, and I knew where the white man lived. He lived, he and his wife and his son, Tony, in a fine brick house plastered white, and surrounded with cool verandas and standing in a compound full of flowers and shade trees. The contrast was very troubling indeed, and that trouble has followed me all the days of my life. I thought of it in England, so compact and so beautiful and safe as it was, and I wondered if the English people knew, and of course they did not know or dream that the very safety of the loveliest country in the world depended upon the feelings between that brown burden bearer far away and that white man who checked his tally stick. And this trouble I carried with me to my own country, not full-blown but folded like a tight bud in the core of my heart.

Before we left Europe, however, we went to Switzerland, a country for which my mother had a great love, partly because of its natural beauty but most of all, I think, because there three different peoples had agreed to live together in peace with themselves and the world. There, too, she had found comfort in earlier years after the loss of her two daughters and her son, all so small, who had not survived swift and deadly tropical diseases, one after the other dying so quickly that she had not been able to recover. Now we spent months in a pleasant little pension near Neuchatel, and my mother sent me to a French school to improve my French accent.

I do not remember such things, I fear, as school. What I see is the pension family of decayed gentility, Madame La Rue, a thin little widow in perpetual black, seated at the head of her scanty table and with much dignity serving the watery soup as though it were vichyssoise, while Monsieur, her eldest son, sat at her right hand to measure each ladleful with his sharp dark eyes. I came to grief with them both in the garden one day when I picked a blackberry and ate it. Monsieur saw me through the parlor window and reported the crime to Madame his mother, and she came out and with the utmost courtesy informed me that the guests were not supposed to pick the fruits. I apologized, burning red, for I had not meant to rob anyone, but only to give myself the joy of eating a berry fresh from the vine.

And I remember that a Russian countess and her two daughters had rooms at the pension also, and that they complained bitterly of the meager menu, and that neither Madame nor Monsieur paid the slightest attention to them, Madame, indeed, turning her fine worn profile away and conversing with her son on the right as though Russians did not exist. I had then long thick blond hair, and one day my mother sent me to the hairdresser with the Russian lady, who wished also to have “the hairs of my daughters washed,” as she put it. At the hairdresser’s she sat waiting and watching and talking without stay, while her daughters were tended, and when my hair was loosed from its braids and brushed and combed with a fine toothcomb, as the “hairs” of her daughters had been, she exclaimed because my hair was “clean,” as she put it.

“Never,” she said in her fervent fashion, “have I seen the hair long and thick, so, but without the insects!”

She beamed admiration and incredulity, and I was too shy to declare that we never had insects, lest her feelings be hurt. Looking back upon her robust and cheerful personality, I doubt she could have been hurt by anything.

And I remember, still instead of improvement in my French, that there were huge black cherries for sale in the countryside about Neuchatel and one day we bought a bagful, my little sister and I, and we ate the half of them before we discovered minute white worms in them. We could not refrain from examining each of the remaining cherries and we found worms in every one, and so we had to believe the worst, gloomy as it was.

Such small scenes took place against an immense background of scenery, the blue lake at Geneva, the waters of Lucerne, and above all the high white Alps.

On the ship crossing to America I spent more thoughtful hours, perhaps, than I had ever before. My mind was full of all I had seen in Russia and Europe and of the talk that I had with many people wherever I went. I was a shy young girl, not used to young people of my own age and race, but I was drawn easily into human lives partly by my own curiosity but more, I think, by imagination which led me to understand feelings and thoughts and compelled me to conversation. I learned early that people are always ready to tell their opinions and troubles and problems and these drew my deepest and unfailing interest, wherever I was. I left the continent of Europe with a fairly clear idea of the peoples there, and especially, perhaps, of England and the English people, whom I could not keep from loving, now that I knew them, although when I saw them in China I had always taken sides against them with the Chinese.

What I realized was that these pleasant peoples, and especially the wonderful English, had no knowledge and therefore no conception of what their representatives in Asia were doing to destroy them. These peoples were living, each in their own beautiful country, entrenched each in their own civilization, without the slightest foreboding of what I knew then was inevitable, the uprising of Asia against them. When I talked with my father about this one evening while we were still on the ship, he said something which I never forgot. “The uprising,” he said, “will begin in Russia, for there the people are oppressed not by foreigners but by their own rulers. The Russians are the most miserable and wretched people on earth today, and there the world upheaval will first show itself. It is clearly foretold in the Scriptures and it will come to pass. When it breaks in Russia it will spread to other countries of Asia, and because men of the white race have been the oppressors, all the white race must suffer.”

I remember the fear that fell upon me and then the passionate pity for those pleasant and endearing people in England and Europe, and I said to my father,

“Can’t we tell them? Can’t we warn them?”